About a week ago, I forever set my gmail settings to forward all my email to my personal mail account. I will no longer be using Gmail as an email interface for a number of reasons:

User Interface
The web has a number of advantages over rich client applications. Some of the advantages are ease of deployment and centralized data storage. The one advantage that a web application does not have is User Interface. AJAX helps bring back some of the interactivity that is lost when moving from a rich client applicatin to a web application. But it is not a panacea that it is hyped to be. It has a number of issues for those that are used to rich client applications.

Specifically for Gmail, here are my issues:
1. The keyboard shortcuts in Gmail are great improvement over legacy web interfaces. But what is the Delete keyboard shortcut? I know there is an Archive keyboard shortcut and a Delete Button, but it is not the same. How do you select all messages on the page with the keyboard? Point being is that most rich client applications worth its salt allows you to change keyboard shortcuts to your hearts desire.
2. How do you drag and drop anything in Gmail?
3. Window management is a nice feature of Gmail, but no where near the interactivity I get with a rich client application. I like opening a message in a new window by just pressing the enter key.

I think the point is that Rich application gives you more flexibility than web interfaces. AJAX helps a lot, but it is all just playing catch up, and will probably never catch up fully.

Because of these reasons, I try to use a rich client application as much as possible over Gmail’s web interface. Which brings me to another reason I am leaving Gmail:

External Access
Gmail’s external access is horrible. The only option you get for accessing Gmail with an external mail reader is POP. And its not like standard POP I see in every other POP mail server in existence. You cannot realistically have two POP clients retrieve mail from Gmail. Even if you set the POP clients to keep messages on the server, the two POP clients will not automatically get the same message. Whoever checks the POP mail first will get the message and other POP clients are out of luck, unless you manually reset the POP settings in Gmail. Not nice.

Thoughts
I love the web’s ability to keep your data centralized and accessible from any computer. What I don’t like is the browser interface. I am a fan of hybrid applications, in which rich applications interact with the web. Currently we have rich applications that are distributed by conventional means, but access the web to leverage the web’s centralized data storage capabilities. The next step is for rich applications to be deployed over the web in a platform agnostic way.

One glimpse of how one can utilize the web is NewsGator. It provides multiple interfaces to the RSS feeds it manages. It provides a Web Interface, Mobile Interface (for PDA, and Cell Phones), and Rich Client applications. This way a user can manage there RSS feeds truly anywhere, with whatever interface they have access to at the moment.

So with that rambling commentary aside. I say goodbye Gmail. It was truly delight to have all that storage at our fingertips. But ultimately, it was just too difficult for my fingertips to conform.